


Glow Up

by corviiy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 05:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6553009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corviiy/pseuds/corviiy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave gets in a fight with Rose, and Kanaya is not having her moirail and matesprit fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glow Up

It's hard to believe an hour ago you were shaking from your very core to your fingertips. 

You're not proud of yourself, you're not proud of the part of your personality that retains the toxic macho alpha male instinct. You don't enjoy the feeling of being so angry that you can't see straight and your skin is cold and your fingernails leave crescent shapes in your palms. You're sick to your stomach that you even HAVE these emotions.

Kanaya knows a thing or two about anger. She knows how to compliment her own with her own balance of behaviors. She's similar to you like that, her true temper only cropping up once in a blue moon, when you have too much time and only your thoughts. You see her sometimes, roaming the halls with her chainsaw in hand and looking for Gamzee. Ultimately she knows its a fruitless effort, but at least she has some activity to diffuse her frustration.

You do not. For all the anger you have churning inside of you, it just gets hotter, boils, sears it's way through your chest. One day you know you'll vomit lava. You came close today, locked in a frustrating last-word match with Rose. You'd asked her to stop doing that. You'd asked her to knock it off. She kept doing it, she didn't knock it off. This was your space too. You'd snapped, yelled at her and grabbed the bottle she was working on, smashing it onto the floor. Your hands shook so hard, the anger vibrated every fiber of your being, and at the same time, the look she gave you made you sick. You couldn't be assed to care when you saw her look away, when she said 'Thank you', because she had to had to HAD TO be the "bigger" person. But you know you crossed a line, because the glassiness of her eyes told no lies.

You weren't ready to back down. You wanted to keep yelling, you wanted every bit of venom to leak into the air around you, but Kanaya knows this feeling. She breaks your line of vision from Rose, who had started up in a fit of passive aggressive mumbling. She'd said 'Come On', she'd said 'Let's Go". How can you argue with that? The lady makes a living out of cutting people in half. She was also, for all intents and purposes, your moirail.

As soon as she gets your eyes off of Rose, all the magma in your chest cools off, becoming a hard, porous rock of guilt from the pit of your stomach to the top of your throat. There is residual anger as Kanaya escorts you to somewhere quieter, but you're more ashamed than anything. Once in her respite block, you break down completely, inarticulately blubbering about how fucking awful and toxic you are, how you'd never hurt Rose, how you lost it and you don't know where it went. Your shit, that is. Fucker probably packed up and moved to Quebec just to get away from you. Kanaya has the patience of a saint, though, letting you grip her sleeves and snot on her shirt until you're calm, but still weighed down with remorse and disgust.

At this point, you pull back away from her. You know you have to go apologize to Rose, but you're not ready even to show your face outside of this room. You feel pretty inconsolable about the whole situation.

"You know, I like to do my makeup when I'm very upset. It helps to calm me down."

You swallow. She knows you want to, but god, you don't have the means or the skills or the confidence to work the face like that. 

"Kanaya, if eyeliner wings were real bird wings, mine would've been from birds that got smashed on the back wheel of some newspaper kid's rusty ass cruiser. Poor fucker just saved up a ton of money from his routes to soup up his digs and now he's got nasty crow guck all over it." She lets you finish, then gives you a soft hush, papping her cold, glowing palm on your cheek.

"I'll do it, Dave. You'll enjoy it, much more than this child enjoyed getting featherbeast innards in his fancy vintage paper-mobile." She reassures you. She definitely gives you the chance to protest. After a moment you snort, bitterly, with a bitter expression.

"Sure, whatever mama. Lay it on me, lay waste to my crater face, contour me up so hard RuPaul will want to recruit me. Seriously if this is gonna happen I want my cheekbones so sharp they razor blades. Let's do this."

You manage to pull a sort of chuckle out of her as she pries you off her amazonian figure. She doesn't leave you alone long, thank god, and comes back with a small arsenal of makeup bags. You know for a fact that half of her collection was alchemized right here, on this meteor as she and Rose tried to find the right skintone foundations. The whole endeavor resulted in Kanaya having a metric fuckton of makeup, obviously NOT to her discontent.

"I'm sorry to disappoint, but we're not going for drag makeup today." She takes bobby pins from her bag and starts clipping your curly locks away from your heated forehead.

"S'bullshit." You mutter, your voice comes out sounding rougher than you're feeling at present, some leftover gunk in your throat from yelling. 

"Mhm." Her attempt to placate you actually works, and you close your eyes gently as she squirts primer into her palm and starts to apply it to your face. You love the way she does it. You've seen some videos on the internet where someone would just smack it on and rub it in. She smooths it, nice and cool over your cheeks, thumbs rolling gentle concentric circles. It's like a cooler slowly shutting down a nuclear reactor, her cold fingers even go over your forehead. She even gives you a little coo of praise when you exhale all that hot air.

"I was so mean to her." Your voice comes out a shaky whine.

"Dave Strider you better not start crying over this primer." You chides you. "You lost your temper, you realize that you were wrong to do so, she probably feels bad too. You just need to relax and clear your head so you can apologize properly, from a place of peace instead of guilt." 

She really sounds like the most gracious mother sometimes. You've never had someone so maternal or parental in your life. 

You sigh, slumping and tilting your head up towards her at the command of her slender fingers. You do what she says when she says it, closing your eyes, tilting your head, holding still. You feel the pinpoint application of concealer over your patches and under your puffy eyes, then wide, ticklish sweeps of power foundation. It smells lightly perfumed, you honestly love it. Sometimes you feel like you could live in the moment of fresh smelling powder foundation.

She starts applying some kind of blendy cream on your eyelids, her fingers gently palpating over them. She highlights the areas around your eyebrows--she has always said you have great eyebrows--and blends it into whatever she put on your lid, you think. 

Next you're pretty sure you know what she's doing. You've seen her do it for herself before. You think the term she used was soft cut creasing. You can feel the calculated, quick and soft strokes over your lid. The space over your eyelid would be light, and in the creases some blended darker color. She repeats the process on the other lid, then pulls back to let you take a moment to blink and breathe. You glance down at the things she's set out for her next round of applications.

"Uh no offense Mommanaya but I don't think fake lashes go with the au-natural look." You inform her upon seeing that she's got lash glue in her pile.

"Why, Dave darling I don't think I asked your opinions, really." Is her response. You give a weak-hearted smile. 

She takes you by the chin again and instructs you to close your eyes. You can tell she is constructing the most hashtag aesthetic wings you'll probably ever carry on your unworthy face. After the second coat, you notice a kind of heavy feeling on your eyelid. Heavy and thick, like she's giving you wings with the glue. You're so past questioning it honestly, even when she starts dabbing at those wings with something coarse and flaky. All you care about is that she has your face in her hands and she's leaning so close that you can feel cool air coming off of her and see the light of her skin through your eyelids.

Her finishing touches are wiping your cheeks and undoing your hair, grooming the plume quickly and gently with her fingers. You think, now, you've simmered significantly into a warm-ish puddle once again. You're no longer carved out of wood, you are truly a wad of cookie dough. She presents you with a hand mirror.

"Well this most certainly ain't a natural look." You tell her frankly. You were right about the style of eye makeup she was giving you. Green, darker green, and gold-white soft cut creasing. You had black wings what were covered in glitter, and a vibrant green line of eyeliner over the wing.

"It's natural for me." She says. "It reminds me that you're mine." The statement is oddly romantic--of course, the pale quadrant was a romantic one, you just sometimes forget how much so i can be and get blindsided by her bolder moves.

"I love it." You really do, you show it by keeping your shade tucked into your shirt instead of flipping them back onto your face. "You did a really good job."

"Don't I always?" Her question is rhetorical, and you take her hand as she guides you to stand up. "Are you ready now? Should I speak to her first?" She runs her fingers over your shoulders and cape, preening your as if you had some sort of dust from sitting down.

"Nah I got this." You tug your shades out of your shirt. "You don't mind if I...?" She shakes her head a little, and you thank her before pushing them onto your head and turning to face your smuppet communicator. 

It rings a couple of times, projection sputtering like it's own form of television static. The first call gets dropped, she doesn't even answer you. Lucky for you, you've hit a stroke of luck. Second time, as opposed to third seems to be the charm. She answers with a pursed, indignant look.

"Dave, I don't really want to--"

"I'm sorry, Rose." This pulls her right out of the rant she was heading towards, and you're looking into where you think she'll be able to see your face head on. "I'm really, really sorry. I lost my mind, dude, and I shouldn't have taken it out on you like that. Wasn't any kinda fair to be yellin' at you when I could've just left." She seems to mull this over in her head, turning it over like a fine wine that has yet to fully aerate. Once done you can hear her sigh.

"I didn't mean to upset you that much, Dave. I accept your apology." Her response is curt, but genuine. That's alright, you know eventually the both of you will get over it, and things will be back to normal.

Your communication device cuts down after a couple of less than sentimental goodbyes. Kanaya sits with her hand in yours until she's absolute sure you're gonna be alright. Once she is, she gives you the gentlest of kisses on the top of your head. You feel okay. Calmer, no longer anywhere near anger. You're tired, though, but upon expressing that she tuts at you like you made her life The Worst.

"After all that trouble getting your squirmy self to cooperate with my ministrations, you're going to go to sleep. Unbelievable." You know she's not really mad. Just fake-mom mad, as evidenced by the fact that she was taking remover sponges and wiping them over your caked face. This pulls a little bit of a grin out of you.

"Wow miss FussyFangs. No good deed goes unpunished, huh?" You comment.

"Certainly not with you around." Her last pad glides over the side of your face and picks up the bronzed color of your concealer. After she's got you as cleaned as you allow her to, she's quick as a whip in escorting you to your bed. Your bed, which is comfy and familiar and safe most importantly. A place where you can't actually feel disgusted or ashamed no matter how you blew up. It was Pavlovian conditioning. Bed meant sleep, sleep felt good.

"Get some rest, Dave. Everything will be okay in the morning." She insists, pulling your blankets up over your shoulders. You catch her hand in yours before she leaves and you turn it over, observing every lovely divet and crease before planting a kiss right in the center of her palm.

"Thank you Kanaya." Your voice is hardly audible, but you are sure she heard you because super troll vamp hearing or something.

As she leaves, you think to yourself how right she is. It will most definitely, eventually, be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> you can kinda tell i ran out of steam near the end huh whoops who cares it's a vent fic


End file.
